So Einstein and Zionism. I’ll put it out there at the beginning — was Einstein a Zionist? It’s not easy to answer.
Yael: People fight over that now in the public sphere. Like if you are at all attuned to anti-Zionist Twitter, there is a huge group of people who look at Einstein’s writings and say it’s very clear Einstein wasn’t a Zionist.
Schwab: From Unpacked, this is Jewish History Nerds, the podcast where we nerd out on awesome stories in Jewish history. I’m Jonathan Schwab.
Yael: I’m Yael Steiner.
Schwab: And Yael, we are back with part two of our epic story about the life of the genius Albert Einstein. We left off in the 1920s. Einstein is in Germany. He has completed this arc going from a struggling student, a patent clerk, someone who’s thinking about physics, to worldwide celebrity, who then embraces a Jewish identity. He had come from a pretty secular family, pretty assimilated, but as he becomes very famous, he really sees himself as a Jew and sees himself as connected to so many Jews. You had asked at the end of the episode — it’s the 1920s in Germany, there’s other stuff going on that we haven’t gotten to yet — and we wanted to save that for this episode because they’re so…
Yael: It seems like things are about to take a turn, maybe for the worse.
Schwab: Yes. So in this episode, we’ll dive much more into that Jewish identity aspect of Einstein. And we’ll talk about two pretty major forces that come up very often in this podcast. They have what to do with each other, but I want to be clear that we’re not relating them in any way. One of them is Nazism.
Yael: “What to do with each other.” Okay.
Schwab: But also we’ll talk about Einstein and Zionism. And both of them deeply affect Einstein.
Yael: Okay, so what year is this?
Schwab: So let’s start off way back in 1884 or 1885, when Einstein is a little kid — he’s five or six years old. This is a story that he refers to many times in his life as sort of his first awakening to what becomes his way of thinking about the world of science. He’s not feeling well, so he’s home from school for the day. Which, I don’t know, maybe that happened often, because as we discussed, it doesn’t seem like he particularly loved the way that school worked a lot of the time. He’s in bed. And there’s no iPad because it’s 1885 or so.
Yael: It doesn’t seem like he needed it.
Schwab: His dad gives him a compass to look at and sort of play with. And Einstein remembers this really vividly and talks about it for the rest of his life — that he realizes there are powerful invisible forces in the world that are acting on this compass. He can’t see what it is that’s making the compass needle move, but something is happening in the world that is affecting it. He starts shaking with this realization. It totally opens up an entire area of his thought for him. And he talks about it as his awakening to science. But I think, like so many of the visual images in Einstein’s story, it’s so interesting to think about — almost like Einstein is that compass. He was his own person, but also there are all these forces in the world that are acting on him and moving him in different directions, and also affecting the way that he thinks about things.
Yael: It’s like he discovers his true north, like the forces all push him into this one trajectory.
Schwab: That’s a great way of thinking about it. And we ended the last episode talking about how the rising antisemitism in Germany is the impetus for the realization of how strongly he feels his Jewish identity. He said, “Don’t define yourselves by being against antisemitism.” But…
Yael: Right.
Schwab: Think about what Jewish identity means, solidarity with other Jews, feeling part of a nation, feeling aligned with your ethnic brothers. So yeah, antisemitism pushes him there. But “true north” is a great way of thinking about it. That’s an orientation that he maintains then for the rest of his life. He always knew which way to point himself.
So in the ’20s in Germany, as you correctly noted, things were getting worse, not better. And not just for all Jews, but increasingly for Einstein himself. The same way that he was very embraced in Western Europe and in America as like the model of a new German citizen — what the post-World War I Germans should look like, what they want — the increasingly far-right, Nazi Germans very much did not like who Einstein was as a person. He’s not a political actor. He never runs for office or anything, but he definitely has beliefs — again, pretty anti-nationalist. He calls himself an internationalist. He doesn’t think that there should be nation states. He’s very anti-military. He’s a very strong pacifist. And he dabbles also in socialism.
Yael: I was going to ask you if he had an economic orientation. Because when someone calls themselves an internationalist, that generally insinuates some sort of communism or socialism.
Schwab: He’s supportive in his writings of labor. And we’ll come back to that in a bit, how that plays out in the power struggles within the Zionist movements.
Yael: Mm-hmm.
Schwab: But as the Nazis increasingly rise to power in Germany, he becomes a very public enemy for them because he’s a Jew, he dabbles in socialism, and his scientific theories seem to be at odds with what the Nazis want to promote — the idea that there can be absolute ideologies, that there are known facts. And Einstein’s talking about relativism, and he’s talking about changing things. So they actually start calling his science “Jewish science.”
And there are some prominent scientists, Philip Lennard and Johannes Stark, who are also Nobel laureates, physicists who become pretty involved in the Nazi movement. They are part of what Einstein called the Committee for Anti-Relativism — or Anti-Relativity Theory. It’s interesting because a question that comes up a lot is: how were Einstein’s political instincts? Was he really naive, or was he smarter than we sometimes give him credit for in that area?
He is completely caught off guard by this, because he welcomes it and says, “Okay, let’s have a scientific debate.” And he’s totally shocked and disappointed when it’s not about who has better science or who has better thought. A large group of antisemitic students show up and they sort of just shout him down. He’s being totally canceled by the Nazi students of a hundred years ago.
Yael: So does he leave?
Schwab: He stays in Germany longer than you might think. He does a lot of traveling, but he is still basically fully employed as a German professor. In 1932, he goes to America for another one of his speaking tours. When Hitler rises to power in early 1933 and openly says Einstein is public enemy number one, people tell him: you cannot go back to Germany. Forget being arrested — you are going to be assassinated. And other people within his circle were being assassinated at the time.
Yael: It’s fascinating to choose to make a scientist public enemy number one. You’d think there’d be more dangerous, nefarious characters to go after.
Schwab: Right. There was a foreign minister of Germany, Walter Rathenau, who was a Jew and a friend of Einstein, and he was assassinated. Einstein is one of the most famous people in the world, and I think he represents to the Nazis a real danger.
Yael: Right, right, right.
Schwab: Hitler comes to power and Einstein does realize: yeah, he should never step foot in Germany again. He stays in America and accepts a position. It’s not like it was hard for him to find something to do.
Yael: People were looking for him.
Schwab: Princeton University creates the Institute for Advanced Study, and that’s where he ends up spending most of the rest of his life. It’s another couple of years until he becomes a U.S. citizen, that wasn’t until 1940. But basically in 1933, Einstein is no longer in Europe and is pretty much permanently in America.
Yael: Does he consider himself to be a refugee?
Schwab: Yeah, I think he does.
Yael: Because he didn’t deliberately leave, but while he was abroad, it became clear that there was no place for him to go back to.
Schwab: Yeah, literally no place for him to come back. They ransacked his house. His home is eventually turned into a summer camp for the Hitler Youth or something like that. And his wife Elsa is with him. And eventually, a lot of the rest of his family comes.
Yael: Was his family with him?
Schwab: And he is obviously horrified by the rise to power of the Nazis. Going back to this idea of like, was Einstein naive or not? No, it seems like he fully understood immediately how dangerous the Nazis were. Almost immediately he sets to work trying to get other Jews, especially Jewish scientists, out of Germany. Einstein, despite his pacifism, very quickly assesses the Nazi threat and is very quick to advocate as much as possible for America to take steps against it. Very famously, he writes a letter to Roosevelt saying: we know based on the science that something like a nuclear weapon can be developed. I’m very concerned the Nazis are going to develop it. The U.S. needs to get there first. And that is really shocking for someone who has spent so much of his life advocating against militarism. That’s, I think, the extent to which he understood how dangerous the Nazis were — that he recommended the development of nuclear weapons.
We’ve got to mention Oppenheimer.
Yael: I was going to say something before, but I didn’t because I wanted to let you get to it organically.
Schwab: We bring up Oppenheimer and that story and that movie all the time. And here’s a guy who’s a pretty important character in that story. Einstein is not directly part of the Manhattan Project. In the movie, they play that off as like, he’s older — it’s sort of for the next generation, you know. But part of it also was concerns about giving him security clearance because of his socialism.
Yael: I thought you were going to say because he was German, but all those nuclear scientists were German. Interesting.
Schwab: No, no — they’re all German, a lot of them. But there were concerns about his socialism. It’s unclear also how hard he fought that. But it doesn’t seem like he was particularly inclined to be directly involved.
Yael: At least like the pop cultural portrayals that I’ve seen make it seem like he has resigned himself to the fact that his scientific work is proving to be the basis for this fundamental destructive force in the world, and he’s resigned to that, but he doesn’t actively want to be a part of it. There’s a scene in Oppenheimer where Oppenheimer and Einstein walk past each other next to a lake in Princeton. And it’s this moment of acknowledgment — the two of us are responsible for this world-changing machine of a magnitude that the world has never known. And part of it is admirable in the sense that we’re advancing the march of science, and part of it is, is this what we are advancing the march of science for? So I could see him — especially the way you portray him as anti-militaristic — sitting back and sighing and saying, okay, I know that I started this race, but I don’t need to finish it.
Schwab: Yeah. The other part that’s probably also the most major factor is that by the 1940s his health isn’t great. He was never in really good health, but his health definitely declines in the late ’30s and ’40s.
Yael: Does Elsa predecease him?
Schwab: Yeah, she does. Elsa dies in 1936, so by quite a bit.
Yael: There was this fictionalized account of a young woman who comes to work for Einstein as a secretary and then also sort of runs his life, makes sure that he has milk in the refrigerator and whatnot. It was a really lovely book. But the picture I have of an older Einstein is just of this elder statesman who is very self-satisfied with his contributions to the world and takes a big step back from his public presence and public persona.
Schwab: He needed somebody to make sure he had milk in the refrigerator, that’s for sure. And I wonder if this becomes even more true after Elsa, who was kind of a gatekeeper for him. After she passes away, he’s not that attuned to, or openly ignores , a lot of social conventions. Later in life there’s a journalist who wanted to understand the theory of relativity more and knocks on his door: “Can you explain this to me?” And Einstein sat and talked with this guy for like several hours. And people asked him, “You could have any of your grad students do that.” And Einstein said, “I’m happy to talk about it. I don’t really care.”
Yael: Did he have children with Elsa?
Schwab: No, he didn’t. She already had older children from her previous marriage, and his relationship with his children from his marriage with Mileva was complicated. I think he had grandchildren and had a relationship with them.
Yael: Not grandfather of the year is what you’re saying.
Schwab: I don’t know, complicated. But not the thing we have time for, because I really want to talk about Zionism. And it’s a huge topic. We literally have three books on Einstein and Zionism that interestingly seem to come to somewhat different conclusions.
Yael: All right.
Schwab: So Einstein and Zionism, and I’ll put it out there at the beginning, big question mark: was Einstein a Zionist? Of these three books, two of them say sort of not really, in different ways, and one of them says yes. It’s not easy to answer.
Yael: People fight over that now in the public sphere. Like if you are at all attuned to anti-Zionist Twitter, there is a huge group of people who look at Einstein’s writings and say it’s very clear Einstein wasn’t a Zionist.
Schwab: Yeah, if you’re choosing quotes you can find different things that seem to very strongly argue for one or the other. And also I think his thinking probably did change over time and with differing circumstances. So yeah, it’s a big open question. I sort of want to talk about the arc of it rather than “was Einstein a Zionist or not.”
Yael: Mm-hmm. How does it start? Is he already in America when he starts grappling with this?
Schwab: It’s way before that. So way back in 1919, we mentioned this in the first episode, he sort of explodes onto the stage when experimental observations of a solar eclipse prove him right. But a few months before that already, Einstein — again, not yet a worldwide celebrity, but a prominent scientist and a prominent Jew in Germany, he’s approached by Kurt Blumenfeld, who is very involved in the German Zionist Federation. His title is Head of Propaganda, which sounds really bad, but I do want to say that was before there were a lot of negative associations with those terms. Nowadays we would probably call him the Director of Communications.
Yael: Because the only other two people I know who are like the Head of Propaganda are Goebbels and Leni Riefenstahl. So that’s it.
Schwab: Yeah, who ruined it for everyone? Kurt Blumenfeld had this position before they did. It’s 1919. Think about it as: he was the Director of Marketing for the German Zionists.
Yael: Got it. It was just messaging.
Schwab: Yeah, and he identifies Einstein as: this is a guy we want to get as part of our cause. We want him to go out on the lecture circuit. We want to say this is someone we identify with. And part of the thought is: we know that he’s not fully bought into this project exactly, but actually we think he would appeal to people like him. Even in some of his letter writing at the time, Kurt Blumenfeld says, “Einstein, as a non-Zionist, will be a useful tool for speaking to non-Zionists.”
And Einstein is a little bit wary, but also open to it. And he’s very careful in his language, he doesn’t say “I am a Zionist,” but he says “I’m in favor of the Zionist cause.”
Yael: Very crafty. You could tell he was a smart guy. Was he getting $7,000 a tweet?
Schwab: Yeah, right. We’ll talk about fundraising. He’s an influencer, a man of great influence. And to have someone of great influence speak on behalf of your cause, even half-heartedly, probably is worth a lot.
Yael: He’s an influencer. To have someone of great influence speak on behalf of your cause, even half-heartedly, probably is worth a lot.
Schwab: Yeah. And one of the first questions that comes up, and this is why it’s good that he wasn’t just tweeting, because he needed more space to figure out how to express this, is that he has been very clear that he’s an internationalist and he’s against nationalism. So how does he seem to be advocating for Jewish nationalism? He answers this in a couple of different ways.
The main two arguments are: first, it’s a different type of nationalistic ideology. He says Jews are a nation because they are spread out, and trying to focus them together is not the same as saying “there are people in this land and we need to kick other people out.” We’re talking about collecting Jews — which is a very fine distinction, but that’s the first idea: this is a little bit different. European nationalism is the thing I’m very concerned about, and Jewish nationalism is not exactly the same as that.
Yael: Mm-hmm.
Schwab: And the other argument, and this one is hard to understand, he writes something like: if a person has both arms and constantly declares “I have a right arm,” then he is a chauvinist. However, if a person lacks a right arm, he must do everything to replace the missing limb. As a Jew, I support the Jewish national cause of Zionism.
Yael: Interesting. I could understand why people might find that hard to parse.
Schwab: I think he’s saying: you have two arms. “I’m a right-armed person” you’re ignoring your other arm. But the Jewish nation, they don’t have any arms. They’re coming at it from having nothing.
Yael: Got it. Like, let them at least get up to the status quo.
Schwab: Yeah. And he also says Jews need to see themselves as part of a broader community from two angles. One, this is a response to antisemitism and this serious need for safety and security. But also, he says, Jews need, and this is something he’s very exposed to, because he sees the Eastern European Jews immigrate to Germany post-World War I, this is a problem: German Jews are judging Russian Jews. We need something that will anchor us so we can all see ourselves as Jews and not as German Jews or Russian Jews, focused on all those distinctions.
Yael: Okay.
Schwab: So Kurt Blumenfeld approaches him and then connects Einstein with Chaim Weizmann, who is like a really good counterpart, or foil.
Yael: He’s a scientist, isn’t he? Doesn’t he invent acetone?
Schwab: I don’t want to argue with your Hebrew teacher. Chaim Weizmann was a Russian Jew who emigrated to England and was a serious chemist. He gets very involved in the Zionist movement. But part of the reason he’s able to have political influence in England was because of his scientific career. During World War I, he works on the process to make smokeless gunpowder, I think, and a naval officer at the time named Winston Churchill, yeah, same guy, sees how important Weizmann is and elevates him continually to important positions, which is how Weizmann is able to have a lot of political influence as he grows support for the Zionist movement, which he becomes the de facto head of when Theodor Herzl dies.
Yael: So Einstein is introduced to Weizmann.
Schwab: So Einstein and Weizmann — yeah, they’re both men of science. It seems like there should be a lot of common ground. But like a lot of Einstein’s intimate relationships, it was very fraught. They would fight a lot.
Yael: Mm-hmm.
Schwab: They mutually admired each other. There are a lot of letters between the two of them, and they would disagree sharply on many, many things.
Yael: It seems like Einstein chooses to never really become a formal part of the Zionist machine. Like, he doesn’t join up with the Jewish Agency, does he?
Schwab: He’s very careful about what he puts his name on. But in 1921, Blumenfeld and Weizmann have this idea of a fundraising trip to America specifically centered on raising money for the Zionist movement and for a university in Jerusalem.
So Blumenfeld and Weizmann have this idea that Einstein should join this fundraising trip to America in 1921. He knows exactly what his role is. He’s sort of cynical about the purpose of his trip. Weizmann and Einstein sail from Rotterdam, it’s a 12-day trip, and they’re received in New York by massive crowds. It’s 1921, Einstein’s at the peak of his celebrity. And a journalist asks Weizmann, who is a scientist in his own right: after spending this transatlantic boat ride with Einstein, do you understand all of his theories? And Weizmann says to the newspaper: “Dr. Einstein explained his theory of relativity every day on the ship. And now that we have landed, I feel very confident that Dr. Einstein fully understands it.”
Yael: Sounds like a lot of professors I know.
Schwab: So both of them are also very quippy. And this is all taking place in a larger context of some disagreement within the Zionist organizations at the time between Weizmann and the other faction, which is led by Louis Brandeis. And Einstein knew what he was doing, he arranges on his own during the trip to America to meet privately with Brandeis to get a better sense of his perspective. That was off the itinerary. Einstein was not supposed to deviate from what Weizmann and Blumenfeld had planned for him.
Yael: He’s the dissenter. That’s what he does.
I just want to note, not really relevant to anything, but Brandeis, Weizmann, and Einstein all have Jewish institutions of higher learning named after them. Three big brains, certainly. No disrespect to Kurt Blumenfeld, here might very well be something named after him as well.
Schwab: Somebody should start a Jewish marketing firm and name it after Kurt Blumenfeld.
But Einstein, going into this American trip, he was sort of cynical about the goals of it. But from the letters that he writes at the time, he is totally wowed by the American Jewish community. It blows him away. 20,000 people line up to welcome him to New York, a lot of them Jews. Everywhere he speaks, because it’s a Zionist speaking tour, he’s speaking to crowds of Jews. It’s just unlike anything he had experienced in Europe. He is bowled over by the Jewish pride, the strength of Jewish identity, and the unity that he’s presented with. He writes: “It is the first time that I saw the Jewish people.” He really feels like he sees something he has never seen up until this point.
Yael: Wow. Does he go to Palestine?
Schwab: That’s the next point we’ll get to. What’s really interesting is that despite seeing how great America is for Jews in 1921, it doesn’t seem to move the needle. His conclusion is not “forget the Zionist project, forget Palestine — we need to just get Jews to America.” He’s pretty firmly in the camp of: that’s really the place where we should be collecting a lot of Jews, which is Palestine.
Yael: That’s the next step on the tour.
Schwab: He doesn’t make a full trip in its own right to Palestine, and that’s the cause of some disagreement. Weizmann and Blumenfeld especially are pushing: you need to go and make your own trip to Palestine. It shouldn’t be the place where you stop as part of a larger trip, which is what he does. He stops in Palestine in 1923 on his way back from a lecture series in Japan. I feel like what your rabbi would tell you is: Israel is not a place you stop over on your return trip from somewhere else.
Yael: That’s a speech I think my childhood rabbi once made about not treating Israel like it’s Disney World.
Schwab: Yeah, right? So they really want him to make a pilgrimage to Palestine, but he goes in 1923 as part of a broader trip. There’s a little bit of frustration with that. But despite that, they still make it a big trip. He’s been involved for a number of years at that point in fundraising and organizing for the university in Jerusalem, which by 1923 they’ve decided will be called the Hebrew University — the Hebrew University we know today.
Yael: Did they ever present the possibility of naming it after him, or was it that they asked him to be the first president of the university? No, that’s lore spinning around somewhere in my brain.
Schwab: I don’t think they wanted to name it after him. The president thing, I think you’re thinking of something else, which we’ll come back to. But there is only one academic institution of higher learning he does allow his name to be used on, which is the Albert Einstein College of Medicine, which at that time was established by Yeshiva University. I work at Yeshiva University in my day job. I knew he agreed for the College of Medicine to be named after him. I knew he was given an honorary degree at one point. I didn’t realize how closely he actually worked with Yeshiva University at points.
Yael: I would like to know more about that, but I think that’s probably a niche interest of mine. As we say on my work calls, we’ll take this offline.
Schwab: A lot of it is online, so we’ll put that link in the show notes. But yeah, the main university he has a connection to is Hebrew U. And when he comes to Palestine in 1923, that’s one of the central parts of the visit, he gives this inaugural lecture at a university that’s being built. It barely exists, but it’s like: the opening lecture at the inauguration will be given by Albert Einstein, which is who you would want.
Yael: Mm-hmm.
Schwab: He is very taken by his experience on this very brief but very impactful trip to British Mandatory Palestine in 1923. He’s especially interested in — because you mentioned it before — the Chalutzim, the agrarian settlers. He wants to see more about kibbutzim. He wants to see Jewish labor in action, which is interesting because the other thing he was advocating for was getting young Jewish academics and scientists out of Europe and finding a home at Hebrew U. But then he was also talking about all the unskilled laborers and how important they are. It’s interesting to think about someone who thought in both ways. Also, Albert Einstein, I don’t think he got his hands dirty a day in his life. He’s not a farm guy. But he really was very interested in seeing them.
Yael: He doesn’t sound like somebody who washed the dishes.
Schwab: That’s the Pintilla rural boy in him.
Yael: Right. You can take the boy out of the country, but you can’t take the country out of the boy.
Schwab: Yeah. And at the end of his trip, he is asked to move permanently to Jerusalem, which is interesting because, this is 1923, it’s 10 years before he leaves Germany, he writes, “My heart says yes, but my reason says no.”
Yael: I mean, at that time it was truly the middle of nowhere.
Schwab: Yeah, logically he should not have gone at all. But it’s interesting that he felt a real emotional pull to it.
Yael: It is really interesting. His parents were fully assimilated. He was never involved in any Zionist youth groups or Jewish youth groups of any kind. This is all self-made.
Schwab: Yeah. He recites a short speech in Hebrew, which he says he read “very cumbersomely” and apologizes for. And it seems like maybe he felt some regret that he didn’t have a better Hebrew education. And then in this speech he expresses joy at “speaking in the land whence the Torah and light emanated to the entire enlightened world.” Whoa — Einstein talking about the Torah. What a shift.
Yael: Yeshiva University right there.
Schwab: Yeah, right. And he understands that it’s a very religious institution. That is something that earlier in life he had very strong feelings against. He’s not religious himself, but it seems like he really does appreciate — when he talks about having positive Jewish identity and pride in it — how valuable religious observance and religious learning can be in that.
Yael: Do any of his writings reflect his own thoughts about theology and religion in general, about God?
Schwab: He’s very clear that he believes in God. He has this quote: “God doesn’t play dice.”
Yael: Is it the God particle?
Schwab: Something like that, he believes that there is a God who has deliberately made… We do have to talk about Hebrew U for a minute. It is an unbelievable mess. The idea that you were going to get some of the most prominent Jewish thinkers from all different areas of Europe, Sigmund Freud was also on that list of prominent Jewish academics recruited to be on the board of governors for Hebrew U. So Einstein and Sigmund Freud, both at the same time, were involved in the board of governors.
Yael: You mean an Israeli bureaucracy is an unbelievable mess? How could that be?
Schwab: And Einstein does not mince words about what he thinks of this process. He loves Hebrew U. It’s his pet project. And he is so deeply distraught about the arguments and what he perceives as mismanagement and what he perceives as the wrong directions that some people want to go in.
Yael: I was going to say — if one hypothetically were to have a doctorate in higher education administration, how would one think about this?
Schwab: Yeah, I was like — this is so fascinating. And the fights are very intense.
Einstein resigns, but says he’s going to do it quietly. He doesn’t want to damage the reputation of the university. He writes about this: “All attempts to find a healthy basis for the development of the university have failed” — and withdraws from it completely. He ends up going back at a different point, thinking this is something that maybe one day he would be a part of again. And then he writes that he sees himself as a Moses-like figure who may never enter the promised land of a reformed university in Palestine. He refers to Hebrew U as his Schmerzenskind — his “problem child” — which I think is a great metaphor. It’s his child, he loves it, but also it’s tearing him apart.
Yael: Right. Interesting. Okay, so he resigns from the University Council.
Schwab: He’s torn up about it because he’s so emotionally invested.
Yael: And how does he spend the 1930s?
Schwab: In the 1930s he’s in America. He’s involved with Hebrew U but from a distance. He steps back a little from the public sphere in the ’30s and ’40s. Again, a big part of it is his wife Elsa dies in 1936. He’s in his 50s and 60s. His health is not great. So he’s just a lot less public, a lot less involved once he’s really settled in Princeton. Like the way it’s portrayed in Oppenheimer — Einstein feeding the ducks by the lake, very quiet — that sort of is what it is. He recedes to a quieter life where he spends a lot of time on his work and a lot of time teaching and writing. He writes a lot of letters to a lot of people. He teaches a lot.
Yael: It’s a quiet life.
Schwab: Mm-hmm.
So Einstein dies in 1955. But the last really important moment, and this is what I think you were maybe thinking about — in 1952, his lifelong complicated friend Chaim Weizmann, who was the first president of Israel, dies. And Einstein is offered the presidency of Israel — not of Hebrew U, of the state of Israel.
Yael: Right, of the state of Israel. Okay, yes, I was definitely mixing those things up in my head. And I assume he declined.
Schwab: Yeah, he declined. He says: “I lack both the natural aptitude and the experience to deal properly with people.” Correct.
Yael: I was going to say he wouldn’t be much of a diplomat, I would assume.
Schwab: Yeah, he’s not the right person for the job. People are like — what? What happened here exactly? He’s the most famous Jew in the world. Imagine if he had done it. But he had a lot of strong ideas and beliefs about things. He was very clearly opposed to militarism throughout his entire life. If he had a vision for a Zionist state, it was one that would be at peace and in cooperation with the Arab population. He was very clear about that.
So supposedly Ben-Gurion, the prime minister at the time, said something along the lines of: “Tell me what we will do if he says yes.” It was just: I’m glad that Einstein declined, because it would have been a real challenge for Ben-Gurion if Einstein had accepted.
Yael: Do we have record? I’m assuming we do, because it seems like we have a lot of his writing — of what his feelings were in 1948?
Schwab: A lot. Just based on how he wrote, I imagine very positive. He writes at plenty of other points that his heart is warmed by the dream and idea of a Jewish state in Palestine. He’s very concerned about violence — in 1929 both against Jews and violence against Arabs. But at a different point he said something like: “The happiest thought I could have is thinking about the existence of a Jewish nation or a Jewish state.”
So — like I said at the beginning — the big question: was Einstein a Zionist? If you read Fred Jerome’s Einstein on Israel and Zionism, Jerome says he’s not a Zionist. Look at all the things he said — he’s concerned about Jewish people, but he’s not a Zionist.
Yael: Quite something for an anti-nationalist to say or feel.
Schwab: If you read Zev Rosenkranz’s Einstein Before Israel, he says Einstein is a “Zionist icon without being a Zionist” that he threaded this needle very carefully of supporting Zionism while not himself being directly involved. Rosenkranz feels strongly that Einstein felt it was important but would not take the step of saying “I am a Zionist myself.”
Stephen Gimbel — I think it’s called Einstein: His Science and His Universe, says yeah, Einstein is a Zionist. What are you talking about? He’s involved in the founding of Hebrew U. He goes to Palestine. He’s offered the presidency of Israel. You can nitpick over language all you want, but what does that mean? He’s deeply involved in the Zionist movement. He’s a Zionist. And I think the point is: that term is really complicated now, and that’s why people want to pin down “he’s a Zionist” in the way that we would define it for what the Zionist movement meant.
Yael: At the end of the day, actions speak louder than words.
Right. Well, that’s something we grapple with today. If someone walked up to me on the street and said “are you a Zionist?”, my first response would be: tell me what you think a Zionist is. Because I think the word has lost all meaning. Did Einstein want a state where the existing Arabs on the land could not live peaceably? Of course not. It seems like he’s very clear about that. Did he want a Jewish national homeland? It seems like he did. But he also had very mixed feelings on what it meant to have a nationalist state. So until we all get on the same page about what Zionism means — which I don’t think is going to happen anytime soon — to answer yes or no to “was Einstein a Zionist” feels disingenuous.
Schwab: Yeah, I think that’s a great way of putting it. It comes back to, was Einstein a Zionist? We have to answer the question of what is a Zionist. We discussed this in part one when Einstein is asked “what is a Jew?” and he’s like: that’s hard to answer. It’s like, what is a snail? An animal that has a snail shell? That’s obviously a snail, but that’s clearly not the way you would define what a snail is.
Yael: Not to drag the conversation down, but whenever people talk about not being able to define something, I always think about the Supreme Court’s definition of pornography: “I can’t define it, but I know it when I see it.” Which is, I think, kind of what Einstein is saying about being a Jew.
Schwab: Yeah, right. So going back to this idea, and this is where I want to wrap up, because we’ve been talking about Einstein now for two whole episodes, what is the arc? Where does his Jewish identity come from?
What is Jewish about him? The big theories are: that it was a pragmatic change, antisemitism made him realize he was never going to not be Jewish, that he could not fully assimilate, and that he needed to find connections and be proud of being Jewish.
Yael: I don’t love that, because I don’t like the definition of Judaism by otherness, that Judaism is itself comprised of the fact that you will never not be a Jew. I don’t want to be defined by what I will never not be.
Schwab: I don’t love it either. That’s why I said it first.
Zev Rosenkranz goes back to this story, which we’ve talked about in part one: Max Talmud, the young medical student who would come to the Einsteins’ home for dinner once a week. That’s what got Einstein interested in science. And if you think about it, there’s more to that story than you realize. Einstein talks about it as an incredibly formative experience. He continued to think about Max Talmud a lot. And Rosenkranz points out: that’s not a random guy mentoring him. That’s about Jewish bonding based on a Jewish communal practice — based on the one semi-ritual observance that his family did — that had this incredible effect on Einstein. And that idea of Jews taking care of other Jews, finding commonality between them, being there for each other, sharing space, having a home, sharing safety and conversation, is something that Einstein does care about for the rest of his life. Rosenkranz is like: it’s a Jewish idea that leads to that. Maybe the idea of the Einsteins hosting this person for a meal once a week, writ large, becomes Einstein’s Zionist turn.
Yael: Interesting. And that’s the person who introduces him to science, who sends him on his whole life’s course. And his name’s Talmud, so…
Schwab: Stephen Gimbel, who I’ve mentioned a couple of times, says: Einstein’s theory of relativity and some of his ideas are attacked as “Jewish science.” And he says: let’s entertain that for a moment. Is there something Jewish about the way that Einstein thinks about the world, about his approach to relativity? Is there something he was in some way absorbing from a culture of Jewishness that, despite his parents’ attempts at assimilation, was being carried on?
He says yes: the history of rabbinic tradition, and the real Talmud, not Max Talmud, but the Talmud, is about the Jewish legal approach not being about one absolute truth. It’s all a matter of perspective. It’s all a matter of debate and resolution and understanding where things are coming from, and understanding that where you are approaching a topic from affects the way that you see it. And that’s what the theory of relativity is: how fast you’re moving can change the way that you observe something. Where you are standing can change the phenomenon that you see.
It’s interesting to think about: oh, Einstein’s “Jewish science” — yeah, I think that is something we can connect with a little bit and say, yeah, that is kind of a Jewish way of thinking about things.
Yael: Like theoretical physics is very much a Talmudic intellectual pursuit.
Schwab: Mm-hmm. Yeah. And we talked about the compass at the beginning. Maybe there is something pulling Einstein to that true north. It’s hard to figure out exactly what it is, but there is a Jewish magnetism that pulls him there.
Yael: Well, I am far from a kabbalist, but I do believe there is a concept of contraction in Kabbalah where the universe, or a person, is contracted into a spark. The physicality of the universe being contracted into a spark is like physics. So maybe there is something quintessentially Jewish to it.
Schwab: I’m taking a deliberately long sip because I don’t know.
The last question this leaves me with, we’ve done two episodes on Einstein, and he looms so large, why do we care that much whether Einstein was a Zionist or not? There are millions of Jews in the world. Why would Einstein’s opinion matter more than anyone else’s? Because he was a genius? He was a genius as a physicist. But if he didn’t agree with Zionism, okay. Would that change the way we see things? And the same with his Jewish identity — if Einstein had not been so embracing of his Jewish identity, would that be harder for us? I’m not sure.
I think part of it is because he was such a celebrity, we want so much to identify with him and to find our ideas reflected in him.
Yael: I think there is something to this, and this maybe speaks a little bit to his theory of relativity. I think there is something to his orientation and place and time. The fact that he is a German Jew at the beginning of the 20th century — when the notion of being a Jew in Germany at the beginning of the 20th century is so fundamental to how we live as Jews now. You mentioned in the Hasidic Ashkenaz episode that the First Crusade was completely reorienting to Jews and how they lived. And for us in recent history, the political trajectory of Germany from the 1920s to the 1940s was a fundamental reorientation of how Jews exist in the world. The fact that Einstein was this German Jew on the world stage at that moment makes him all the more important in our national story — because of this tremendous upheaval that occurred in that moment, and the way in which he came out the other side and how he oriented himself. Claiming Einstein allows us to tell a story about ourselves where we’re important and we’re smart and we’re right.
Schwab: That’s a great way of putting it.
Yael: I agree with you when you say we could do an entire season, if not more, on the phenomenon that is Albert Einstein. There’s a great statue of Einstein in D.C. that makes me happy. You should look up a picture of it if you haven’t seen it — you can climb on it and sit on it. You can sit on Einstein’s lap. It’s really interactive and tactile. I feel very good when I see it and I’m part of it. And I think this episode made me feel a similar way. Hopefully our listeners agree.
If you did enjoy this episode, or you’ve enjoyed other episodes, we’d really appreciate it if you tell a friend about us and share us to your social media — share us in your family WhatsApp groups and your community WhatsApp groups. I know that’s how a lot of people blast out their news these days. And yeah, we would really love for you to spread the word about these really cool stories in Jewish history. Some pretty universally fundamental people have been a part of our people, and that’s cool.
Schwab: Yeah. Thank you.
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This episode was hosted by me, Jonathan Schwab, and by me, Yael Steiner.
Our education lead is Dr. Henry Abramson. Our editors are Rob Pera and Ari Schlacht. We’re produced by Jenny Falcon and Rifky Stern.
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